‘SHE WORKED FOR THEM, SHE STARVED FOR THEM’
Hemingway’s 1923 Star Santa Fund plea for mom:
“She had worked until she had become a shadow. Her big eyes in sunken lids seemed to hold flame as they glowed from the pallid transparency of her thin face. Her lips were colorless. There was not a spare ounce of flesh on her nor a spare gill of blood in her veins.”
Though this gripping portrait of a single mother of three was penned by Nobel Prize-winning American author Ernest Hemingway, it cannot be found in any of his famous novels or short stories. In fact, it’s not even fiction. The impoverished single mother of three was the subject of a November 1923 Santa Claus Fund story back in the days of the Toronto Daily Star. And Hemingway was the reporter assigned to her story.
Hemingway, famous for The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea, began working as a Star freelancer when he was 20, became its European correspondent at 22 and returned to local staff at 24.
As the charity, started by publisher Joseph E. Atkinson in 1906, does not solicit donations, the pages of the Toronto Star newspaper and online stories provide the only means of communicating the charity’s work to Canadians — and the only means of raising the money needed to provide the gift boxes.
Just as it did in 1906, when the fund was able to help more than 350 children in Toronto, every dollar raised goes toward the cost of the gifts.
Hemingway’s words written for the Santa Claus Fund capture a dark time of poverty during post-First World War Canada, in the years leading up to the American stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.
Under the headline, “She sacrifices herself that children may live,” Hemingway writes: “The woman was crucifying motherhood. Her husband had left her with three small children to provide for. So because they were of her body she was giving her body as a sacrifice to save them from death.”
In today’s dollars, the woman earned about $85 a week, and spent much of it on rent and babysitters for her children so that she could work, with just $20 to feed them each week.
Hemingway’s heart-wrenching account was part of the Star’s campaign to raise $30,000 to provide gift boxes to more than 14,000 children that year. “We want to make sure that every child in the city has a decent Christmas,” read the plea for dona- tions. More than a century after the fund’s launch, that mission has not changed.
This year, the Santa Fund needs to raise $1.7 million to provide 45,000 underprivileged children in Toronto, Mississauga, Brampton, Pickering and Ajax with gift boxes, which are delivered to homes by teams of volunteers. With just over one week till Christmas, more than $320,000 is still needed to meet that goal.
Recipients receive a warm shirt (toddlers get a fleece-lined tracksuit, while newborn infants get a fivepiece set including onesies), a warm hat, warm gloves or mittens, socks, a toy, a book, cookies and dental hygiene items (age 4 and up) inside.
For many of the kids, it’s the only present they’ll receive, which is why the gift boxes aim to cover the basics and then some.
It’s unclear from Hemingway’s story what became of the woman and her children.
But if his words were successful, there’s a chance they, too, may have received a Santa Claus Fund box in their time of need. If you have been touched by the Santa Claus Fund or have a story to tell, please email santaclausfund@thestar.ca. You can read Ernest Hemingway’s Santa Fund story as it appeared in the Star below.